There have been many attempts to recycle tires and other rubber products to reclaim usable hydrocarbons through the use of a process called pyrolysis. Through pyrolysis, tires have been processed to produce fuel and other hydrocarbon compounds. One particular byproduct resulting from the pyrolysis process is an ash or char material which is leftover after the process is complete. Attempts have been made to use this char as a low grade carbon black for use as a type of filler. However, this has been met with several disadvantages, most significantly the disadvantage of the impurities in the char resulting from the random distribution of particle size of the char itself. It has been found that a composition of raw char has large particles or large agglomerates, and small particles or small agglomerates. However, some applications for using carbon black as a filler compound require that the carbon black mixture consists of primarily small agglomerates which create a “fluffy” carbon black mixture suitable for use as a filler for rubber in plastics.
There have been attempts to create “fluffy” carbon black by using grinders that crush the mixture of reclaimed carbonaceous materials into small particles or agglomerates. However, these attempts have not always produced a mixture with consistent agglomerate size and such mixtures often have an unfavorable nitrogen surface area of the agglomerate particles. Thus, there exists a need to fractionate samples carbon black containing agglomerates into mixtures having consistent particle size and different grades or classifications based on particle size and other factors.
Accordingly there exists a need to improve the identification and separation of carbon black containing agglomerates into mixtures having smaller more consistent agglomerate sizes and better physical properties such as a high nitrogen surface area value.